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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> writes:
|> Well it can be avoided OK by not doing it, I am just wondering what it
|> leads to if the firmware is broken for some things and we don't have a
|> way to update it.
|| Does it mean that there's no and will not be any way to update
| WLAN firmware in-field? OM managed to talk TI into allowing calypso's
| update but it's not possible with
| now-finally-dev-friendly-softmac-friendly Atheros? That's
| dissapointing, to say the least (while refraining from explecitives).
|| What about GTA03's chip? The Marvell's press release talks about
| "firmware upgradeable Bluetooth 2.0 EDR". But one shouldn't trust
| press releases. Moreover, judging from that "document" it seems that
| its firmware may be too capable (integrated supplicant, TCP/IP stack,
| bluetooth profiles). That's worrying especially if the firmware is
| closed-source. BTW, is monitor mode supported? Can hostap be used with
| that?
Marvell chip has currently gone away from GTA03, so there will
definitely not be any firmware problems :-)
| Joerg on IRC told me that OM's learned a lot from calypso's story and
| that they wouldn't use non-field upgradeable firmware in the
| future. Is it the case? (OM has enough problems with (hard for some)
| field-upgrades of hardware, but having such a situation with firmware
| is somehow ...(swearing)).
Joerg's entitled to his opinion.
I would use firmware that is not upgradeable again, but it would depend
on what its role is and the advantages. For example, we very gladly use
the ROM firmware in s3c6410 that is not upgradeable to get us SD Card
boot on GTA03, in a way that is definitively unbrickable.
The not-really-updateable GTA02 NOR scheme has increasing disadvantage
as the U-Boot in there ages. But, it has actually done its job really
well again in terms of delivering unbrickability on the soft side anyway.
Every uSD card has non-upgradeable firmware inside it.
Not sure the GPS chip firmware is in flash either.
So it's too simplistic to say that such things are banned as a class.
But it's clear people will remember to ask from now on, "and what's the
plan to make sure there are zero bugs in the critical function?" if it's
~ suggested.
| OT: have you missed my proposed patch to Qi's README or is it just a
| matter of bad wording? I think that README should describe enough of
| UI to make ordinary user happy. For you reference:
|http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openmoko.kernel/7584
Sorry, I missed it. It's on the git now.
- -Andy
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